Art Market Report - December 17
A weekly report on the NFT Art Market, covering 1/1s, generative art, editions and other important news.
Christie’s Next Wave: The Miami Edit
The results for Christie’s Next Wave: The Miami Edit sale were mixed, quite indicative of the current state of the crypto art market. Here are the top 5 sales:
The Thought of You by Ryan Koopmans was collected by a traditional art-collecting couple in Canada for 20 ETH, which will be their first ever NFT. As part of the The Wild Within collection, The Thought of You revives an abandoned historic building by merging photography and animation, giving rise to a surreal, contemplative, and dynamic architectural realm.
alignDRAW, A stop sign is flying in blue skies by Elman Mansimov was collected by delronde for 15 ETH. The first text-to-image artwork from 2015. By early 2015, neural networks had mastered the art of 'image-to-text' and could create natural language captions for images. Flipping this process, and turning text into image, was a much more complex challenge solved by 19-year old prodigy Elman Mansimov's alignDRAW model.
Bali Moon by GMUNK was collected by Allan Cassis for 14.23 ETH. Bali Moon is a hypnotic fusion of the biological and the technological, where a jungle photographed in the full-spectrum of light seems to respond to the gentle, algorithmic cadence of a machine learning to subdivide cells as pixels.
Mother of Menelik by Yatreda ያጥሬዳ was collected by Alexis Ohanian / sevensevensix for 10 ETH. Kiya Tadele, the leader of the Ethiopian art collective Yatreda ያጥሬዳ, not only directed this compelling motion portrait but also embodied the legendary Queen herself while eight months pregnant.
Signature #0 by Jack Butcher was collected by Kenshiro for 9.69 ETH. Signature #0 is token #0 of Jack Butcher's 200 piece Art Blocks generative collection, Signature.
Digital Art Fair X Phillips: Online Auction, Hong Kong
Refik Anadol had 3 sales: Bosphorus B: Data Sculpture was collected for ~63 ETH, Pacific Ocean A ~59 ETH, and Black Sea A: Data Sculpture ~44 ETH.
Crescent Blue by Emily Xie, combining digital collage, algorithmic textures w/ Javascript, montaged generative AI assets, and hand-drawn elements, was collected by DappPunk for ~10 ETH.
1/1s
𝙱å𝚛𝚍 𝙸𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚘𝚗 had 2 secondary sales on SuperRare this week: Artificial Net Of Color Dreams was collected for 4 ETH, and No Mistakes just Happy Accidents collected by Jediwolf for 3 ETH; as well as one secondary sale on KnownOrigin: Neural Dream Map collected by Jediwolf for 8 ETH. All three were AI art minted in late 2018/early 2019. Jediwolf has been assembling a well-curated Under the GAN collection consisting of works from “Early Pioneers of AI Art (2017-2019).”
The Tree of Life by Yatreda ያጥሬዳ was collected by Arab Bank Switzerland for 10 ETH. According to the artist, “The Genesis tale of Adam and Hewan (Adam and Eve) is the origin story for many faiths around the world. This collection is about reimagining a human legend we are all familiar with, and sending it into the future with our own artistic interpretation.”
Collection Bold Pepes by BoldLeonidas had another 5 sales on Foundation this week, a total of ~7.8 ETH.
CROWDED SOLITUDE by RANDOM FREAKS was collected by GVG for 6.69 ETH on SuperRare, an ATH for the artist. Check out the behind the scenes video here.
Yearn by noCreative was collected by nftlisa for 3 ETH on SuperRare.
GENERATIVE ART & EDITIONS
XCOPY dropped OBLIVION (edition of 500) through burn to redeem mechanics (1× MAX PAIN AND FRENS = 1×OBLIVION) at the price of 0.1 ETH on new contract DAMAGE CONTROL. Floor of OBLIVION has now gone up to 0.925 ETH at the time of writing. MAX PAIN AND FRENS was burnt down to 6,969 editions, and had a 167 ETH (+531%) trading volume on OS this week, with floor currently at 0.55 ETH (+41%). According to XCOPY, “2024 burn/redeems will mint from the 'DAMAGE CONTROL' contract.”
After the auction at Christie’s, Fellowship released fully on-chain NFTs of the historical artwork alignDRAW (collection of 2,709) — the first text-to-image artwork — containing all the original 32x32 pixel images created by Elman Mansimov in 2015, representing the birth of text prompt AI generated imagery. The collection had a 199 ETH trading volume on OS since the release, with floor currently at 0.23 ETH.
Fidenza #985 was collected by jdh for 125 ETH.
IRL OPENING
House of Medici opened GRANT YUN | Los Angeles — a solo exhibition in collaboration with PROOF @ The Foundry, December 12-14.
ANNIVERSARIES 🎉
Beeple celebrates the 3 year anniversary of the BEEPLE: EVERYDAYS - THE 2020 COLLECTION drop on NiftyGateway—a record-breaking sale that captured the interest of Christie’s and played a pivotal role in setting up the historic auction three months later.
2 year anniversary of Grifters by XCOPY.
10 winners of #griftszn2 (Grifters meme competition) were gifted XCOPY 'proto-hype' Grifters, minted on another new XCOPY contract GRIFT SZN.
Thank you for this fren.